Travel Medicine and SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

Dear Colleagues, 

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been a major global health problem with inevitable but important consequences for travel medicine. The two most important stakeholders in travel medicine, namely travelers and practitioners, have both been seriously affected, albeit for different reasons. In the first year of the pandemic, the number of people traveling, including those traveling by air, dropped to extremely numbers due to mobility restrictions; on the other hand, with health services overloaded, most travel medicine practitioners have been actively involved in areas of public health and patient care, including vaccination, which will continue for many months to come.

We foresee that mobility limitations and confinement will soon result in a dramatic rise in the number of travelers, some with vaccine- or disease-acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2 and others without immunity. Their destinations will have different epidemiological patterns of COVID-19, including new variant incidences and prevalences.

This Special Issue will discuss the most important problems involving travel medicine and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. We aim to update, from the travel medicine perspective, the knowledge of travelers’ risks when traveling to a region where SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted. Papers to be included in this Special Issue will address the following areas: SARS-CoV-2 virologic characteristics, including genetics and evolution of the virus and its variants, geographic distribution and prevalence, and new surveillance approaches; outbreak prediction and risk assessment; host immunology and transmissibility, clinical features and outcomes; advances in the diagnosis, with better and more rapid antigen and antibody diagnostic tests to be used before and/or during travel; existing vaccines’ characteristics, protection ad contribution to transmission; SARS-CoV-2 variants and efficacy of vaccines; safety of air travel; ethical and legal problems related to the inequity of access to immunizations in different countries and regions, and concerns about the “immunity passport”, a proof of immunization (natural or post-vaccination) against SARS-CoV-2.

Dr. Jorge Atouguia
Dr. Jose Muñoz
Dr. Andrea Rossanese
Guest Editors

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